28 Oct 2013
In the context of obtaining a patent, a “search” is a professional search of various online databases for inventions that are similar to your invention. The name of such searches varies within our industry, but at our office we simply call such searches a “Patent Search,” and is also often called a novelty search. Patent...
27 Oct 2013
Ibormeith IP, LLC, a company owning the patent rights to technologies in the automotive industry, was assigned a patent on some really neat safety features for automobiles- a monitoring device to alert drivers that may be falling asleep. Due to an inadequate disclosure in the patent’s specification, however, Ibormeith recently lost its claim for patent...
25 Oct 2013
The value of this program for the small inventor with an eye on the budget is tremendous. The program is best explained by an example. First, I will explain the patent application filing costs at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) without this program.* Take small inventor Mark, who qualifies as a “micro-entity.” ...
21 Oct 2013
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision holding Sturm did not infringe Keurig’s patents, because Keurig’s patent rights were exhausted. Patent exhaustion is an affirmative defense to a claim of patent infringement, which is triggered, in some instances as in this case, when a patent owner authorizes...
14 Oct 2013
In a case that should serve as a warning to anyone looking to overcome Office Actions by making misleading or false statements to the PTO, an infringement action was dismissed after a patent was found unenforceable due to inequitable conduct during its prosecution. A patent involving wireless transmission of caller identification information, owned by Intellect...
5 Oct 2013
The United States Trademark and Patent Office (USPTO) recently refused registrations for trademark filed by the city of Houston, Texas and the District of Columbia, which sought to register marks that included official government seals. The court cited Section 2(b) of the Lanham Act, which prohibits registration of a proposed trademark that consists of or...
12 Sep 2013
What do UPS, Tiffany, and 3M have in common? Chocolate brown trucks, robins-egg blue colored jewelry boxes, and canary yellow sticky notes. Chocolate brown, robins-egg blue, and canary yellow. Color, color, color is the answer of course! These are the distinctive colors that these prominent companies use to identify themselves. It may be more apt...
15 Aug 2013
Victoria Espinel, intellectual property chief at the White House, has stepped down from her official position as of August 9, 2013. Espinel was the first person to ever serve as the official intellectual property enforcement officer at the White House, a position that was established through Congressional legislation in 2008 but was not filled until...
9 Aug 2013
A confederation of tech executives have banded together in an attempt to lobby Congressional lawmakers in the US House of Representatives for laxer intellectual property laws. This is an odd occurrence, one would think that tech CEOs like these would want more stringent IP laws in order to protect their assets, but these executives maintain...
9 Aug 2013
For a couple of years now, General Electric has been looking to make serious investments in solar energy research and development. In 2011 PrimeStar Solar and announced that they would use that company’s resources to begin manufacture of solar panels in Colorado. However, the enterprise came to an unexpected end yesterday when solar power rival,...
9 Aug 2013
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is best known as the preeminent digital rights advocacy group, possibly in the entire world. Think of any noteworthy piece of legislation in the past couple of decades and the EFF has more than likely participated in the drafting of that legislation, critiquing the legislation, or campaigned on behalf of digital...
5 Aug 2013
There are many well founded fears about progress and how intellectual property may come to reshape our society. The New Statesman however, has hit on the most solid and grounded fear of them all: that robots are coming to steal your job. And not just blue collar jobs either, Alex Hern’s article opines that white...